Literally Literary

Chōkōdō Shujin (澄江堂主人). Writer and translator. Quotes from Japanese literature by Sōseki, Akutagawa, Mishima, Arishima, etc. Pessimistic individualism. 🎌

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"Only art makes human beauty endure."
Yukio Mishima, 'Kyoko's House'

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I've known supreme happiness, and I'm not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends. Wouldn't it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does?

Yukio Mishima, 'Spring Snow'

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We, as human beings, probably can't provide answers or solutions towards this difficult life. But we can give it the right gloss.

Hideo Kobayashi, dialogue on 'Believing and Thinking'

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I am not saying that we should abandon science. However, we must not be defeated by science.

Hideo Kobayashi, lecture, 1970

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The boy felt a consummate accord between himself and this opulence of nature that surrounded him. He inhaled deeply, and it was as though a part of the unseen something that constitutes nature had permeated the core of his being.

Yukio Mishima, 'The Sound of Waves'

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So long as he had observed the unknown from a distance, his heart had been peaceful, but once he himself had boarded the unknown and set sail, the uneasiness and despair, confusion and anguish had joined forces and borne down upon him.

Yukio Mishima, 'The Sound of Waves'

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He knew nothing of that melancholy and all-too-effective way of passing time by magnifying and complicating his feelings, whether of happiness or uneasiness, through the exercise of imagination.

Yukio Mishima, 'The Sound of Waves'

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There are things in life that cannot be said with words.

Hideo Kobayashi, lecture

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The aim of the historian is to bring history back to life in his own mind. If you are to be a historian, you must properly face the hearts of the ancients with a modern mind.

Hideo Kobayashi, lecture

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Mine is a pale, secret flame, not one that flares up brilliantly.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, 'The Key'

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I don't like to let others know what is in my own mind, and I don't care to pry into theirs.

Junichiro Tanizaki, 'The Key'

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He heard the sound of waves striking the shore, and it was as though the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the movement of the sea's great tides.

Yukio Mishima, 'The Sound of Waves'

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Science is not of any use in knowing things. Well, in order to go to the moon, to kill the enemy, to get things without labor - all those kinds of actions, science plays a very important role. But science does not help us understand what it means to be a human being.

Kobayashi

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Modern people think that they have to act immediately. To know pathos is not an action. It is to see things, to know, in other words, to recognise. Modern people have forgotten that truly knowing things is a power.

Hideo Kobayashi, lecture

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Whatever you do or think or say is finally unrelated to the urgent life force of a changing society. And that is how you shall always be: empty-headed until death! Empty-headed until death!

Sōseki, 'Sanshiro'

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Something very odd has come into fashion since the start of this twentieth century of ours, a convoluted tactic of fulfilling the needs of altruism through egoism.

Sōseki, 'Sanshiro'

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He thought that without entering into the tradition, one cannot know one's true self. And he knew that to go deep into the tradition is to open oneself towards the universal.

Hideo Kobayashi, lecture

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Science inevitably goes as far as to deny freedom.

Hideo Kobayashi

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@captivedreamer7 'For Those we Love' (2007)

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Beauty is a crippling existence as well. They must serve their own beauty for the rest of their lives. Everything but beauty must be sacrificed.

Yukio Mishima, 'The Goddess'

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Political thought that calls itself progressive, fictional forms that call themselves humanistic, pulpit philosophy that calls itself the elucidator of historical and cognitive movements, all work together for the banishment of the true poet.

Hideo Kobayashi, 'Rimbaud 3'